Trifari, to make him stand up, gave him two blows, one on the arm, the other on the shoulder. It brought quite a new sort of doleful expression on the unlucky impostor's face.
'What are you doing? Are you not ashamed?' shouted Don Gennaro, quite scandalized.
'He treats me so at all hours of the day,' the medium muttered in a thread of a voice.
'Keep up your courage; you will come away with me,' said the money-lender, handing him a flask of brandy that he always carried.
'I shall not have the strength, sir,' said the other feebly. 'They have killed me, shut up here, with no air nor light, with this stink that makes me sick. I have generally fasted or got poor food, and been worried all the time to give lottery numbers. I was often beaten by this hyena of a doctor, that the Lord has brought into existence, for my sins. It is agonizing, sir; I am in agony.'
'How could you do that to a man--a fellow-Christian?' Parascandolo asked severely, looking at the other two.
'See who is preaching!' shouted Trifari. His impudence was indomitable.
'You, my lord, a gentleman!' said Parascandolo, making out he would not speak to Trifari.
'What would you have? Passion carried me away,' said the old man, quite humiliated, shivering from other remembrances also.
Just then came in at the door, which had been left open, Colaneri, the viperish professor, and Don Crescenzio the lottery-banker. On seeing a stranger, recognising Don Gennaro, they understood all, and looked at each other dismayed, especially Don Crescenzio, who was a Government official, as he said.
The money-lender went on smoking coolly, whilst the medium, getting weaker, let his head fall back on the chair. The house, which had been a prison for a month now, had an ugly, sordid look, and the artificial light of the lamp in full day wrung the heart like the wax tapers round a bier. Really, Don Pasqualino looked like a corpse.
'Have so many of you set on one man?' the money-lender asked, without directly addressing anyone.
'Why did he not give the lottery numbers at once?' yelled Colaneri, pulling at his collar with a priestly gesture. 'No one would have done anything to him then.'
'You could be sent to the galleys for this, you know,' said the usurer rather icily.